Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2016

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

Fine Arts

Degree Program

Art (Creative) and Art History

Committee Chair

Jarosi, Susan

Committee Member

Chan, Ying Kit

Committee Member

Koelrs, Avery

Committee Member

Cheetham, Mark

Author's Keywords

contemporary art; eco-art; environmental art; environmental ethics; site specificity; responsibility

Abstract

This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary theory for examining the ethical dimensions of contemporary eco-art, based on the conceptual interplay between the art historical discourse of site specificity and philosophy of environmental ethics. It considers how eco-art redefines site specificity as eco-ethically-oriented site reform, and argues that eco-artists’ site-reformative actions are not only environmentally impactful and beneficial, but are also site-responsible because they realize humankinds’ moral obligations to respond to the human-caused ecological crises of the present by improving the degraded conditions of specific sites and amending site-destructive conduct. Site-reformative eco-artworks in turn yield variable propositional content that demonstrates site responsibility by giving moral clarity, import, and binding force to specific, actionable, human-behavioral changes conducive to the pursuit of ecological sustainability. I apply this theory of site responsibility to ten different eco-artworks representative of the genre’s three predominant modes of site reform: documentary, activism, and remediation. This framework for eco-art ethics is ideally suited for analyzing the morally relevant attributes of the broad spectrum of artistic practices that have developed within the field of eco-art since the late 1960s, and is designed to facilitate well-reasoned assessments of their eco-ethical value.

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